Chicago has always had a kinetic pulse. Stand at any Loop corner and you feel it: the steel skeleton of the L humming above, declaring that this city believes in motion. The tracks run not only through downtown corridors but through the city’s sense of itself. Chicagoans will tell you that you can navigate life here without a car, but you cannot navigate it without the L.
It’s a beautiful mythology. It’s also increasingly at war with mathematics.
The trains that once signaled progress have become monuments to deferred maintenance. The L faces an unfunded capital backlog of thirty billion dollars. Thirteen billion of that is just to keep existing infrastructure functional. Another ten billion would modernize what we have. Five billion more for expansions like the Red Line Extension. One quarter of the system has exceeded its useful life, which is a polite way of saying it should have been replaced years ago.
The operating reality is bleaker still. Transit agencies project an annual structural deficit between two hundred and two hundred fifty million dollars beginning in 2026. That’s the optimistic estimate. The original projection was seven hundred seventy million dollars. Pandemic relief dollars kept the trains running. By the end of 2025, only forty-eight million dollars of that support will remain.
Here’s the number that tells the real story: Chicago recorded an average weekday ridership of roughly seven hundred sixty-eight thousand in 2015. By 2024, that number fell to three hundred eighty-nine thousand. The decline is nearly fifty percent.
Something fundamental has shifted. Work patterns changed. Remote work created a new geography of time and space. Transit schedules designed around the rhythms of nine-to-five commuters are colliding with the fluid unpredictability of a hybrid workforce. The old social contract between cities and their transportation systems has been rewritten, but nobody sent transit agencies the memo.
The Pension Crisis That Eats Tomorrow
The state does not have the budget capacity to rescue the system through traditional appropriations. Illinois contributes only seventeen percent of operating costs for transit while peer states contribute forty to fifty percent. Transit funding was cut by more than four hundred million dollars since 2011 even as the state budget grew by twenty billion dollars.
The absence of support is not due to indifference. It’s due to insolvency.
Illinois carries one hundred forty-four billion dollars in unfunded pension liability. The funded ratio is only forty-six percent, which means the state has less than half of what it needs to pay the promises it made. Taxpayer contributions to pensions rose from six hundred fourteen million dollars in 1996 to eleven point two billion dollars in 2025. Lawmakers are planning to short the required payments by five point one billion dollars this year.
This is not a budget problem in the normal sense. This is a gravitational field. Every dollar that flows into pensions is a dollar that cannot repair cracked viaducts, modernize signals, or eliminate the slow zones that make commuters check their watches and curse.
The pension system has become a fiscal python, slowly constricting every other priority.
The Cost Overruns That Shatter Trust
Consider the Red Line Extension. The project ballooned from a proposal of three point two billion dollars to a total cost of five point seven billion dollars. Federal funding that once covered sixty percent of the project now covers only thirty-three percent. The Chicago Transit Authority must borrow heavily and will carry that debt through the 2040s.
Or look at the Red and Purple Line Modernization, which promised to rebuild century-old track and stations. Federal funding was frozen due to political concerns about race-based contracting requirements. Politics delayed construction. The deterioration, of course, did not take a breather.
The problem is not just finding money. The problem is persuading a skeptical public that money will be used responsibly. Every cost overrun is a small death for public trust.
The Bill That Almost Changed Everything
State lawmakers proposed the Sustainable Transit for Northern Illinois Act (HB 3438). The bill would have dissolved the Regional Transportation Authority and replaced it with the Northern Illinois Transit Authority. The vision was elegant: fare integration across systems, coordinated service planning, one point five billion dollars of annual funding, with two hundred million dollars reserved for downstate systems.
The bill collapsed under the weight of the revenue debate. Specifically, it collapsed over one idea that was simple to explain and politically explosive: a nearly five percent tax on unrealized capital gains above one billion dollars.
The Billionaire Tax and the Paradox of Populism
Imagine this scenario. A hedge fund manager’s portfolio increases by one billion dollars on paper. The state taxes a portion of that increase even if no asset has been sold, no cash has changed hands. The pitch has an emotional logic: the city needs money, billionaires have money, therefore tax the billionaires and fund the trains.
Critics call it a liquidity trap. You pay taxes on value you haven’t realized in cash. Defenders say billionaires can afford it.
Both sides miss the deeper problem: volatility. If the tax on unrealized gains becomes the fiscal engine for transit, then transit becomes hostage to the daily mood swings of asset markets. The L would rise and fall on a spreadsheet belonging to someone who never takes the train. A hedge fund manager’s bad quarter becomes a transit agency’s crisis. This is not how you build durable systems. Still this has to be on the table.
What Sustainable Funding Actually Looks Like
Transit needs stability. It needs revenue that rises with urban economic activity, not with the S&P 500. A credible funding portfolio would include congestion pricing with revenue locked to transit improvements. It would capture some of the land value created by new transit stations and return it to the system. It would establish a regional payroll mobility contribution that distributes costs across everyone who benefits from the region’s connectivity. It would revise rideshare and curbside access fees to reflect the real impact on transit corridors. It would pursue federal grants that reward fix-it-first discipline rather than expensive expansions.
The unrealized gains tax may still have a role. It could accelerate specific capital projects or eliminate the worst slow zones that choke reliability. But it cannot become the financial foundation of the system. That would make transit hostage to both equity markets and election cycles, a double dependency no public system should accept.
The Choice We Keep Avoiding
Cities reveal their values by what they choose to maintain. Nobody visits Chicago for its pension system. People visit for the architecture, the energy, the culture. They remember the sound of the train passing overhead as they drink coffee at a sidewalk table. They remember the way the city feels alive.
Transit is not just infrastructure. It’s freedom. Mobility, proximity, choice, dignity. A region that cannot fund its transit system is a region that has accepted a kind of slow decline, a retreat from the shared project of urban life.
The public does not expect perfection. We are too wise for that. What we expect is progress: reliability, clean stations, trains that arrive when promised. We expect a government that can distinguish between maintaining what works and throwing money at what doesn’t.
The Moral of the Infrastructure
Chicago does not lack ideas or ambition. It lacks a political coalition willing to do the difficult thing: fund the future rather than service the past. The L is more than a transit system. It’s a decision point, a marker of whether a city still believes in its own possibilities. Cities either evolve or they retreat from ambition. There is no stable middle ground.
Illinois must decide whether transit will remain a symbol of its faded industrial past or become the infrastructure of its rebirth. The trains are still running. The question is: for how much longer, and for whom? The answer will tell us what kind of city it is becoming.